Story Highlights

Floating facedown in the bathtub, his mother screaming in the background, the life of 1-year-old James Larkin was almost snuffed out before it began.

That life would be a troubled one. His mother would die when he was still young, and after a discharge from the Army, he'd return to his home in Rochester. He would marry his high school sweetheart, but he'd struggle with a drug problem, and he'd spend some time in prison before eventually moving to Atlanta. Today, at age 51, he's working as a bricklayer and trying to get his life back on track.

But Larkin's life story wouldn't be a story at all if not for Gap and Chuck Mangione.

Just four days before the Rochester race riots broke out in July 1964, Larkin's mother was cooking when she realized she'd left her son alone in the bathroom. Upon seeing him in the tub, she was so distraught that she didn't even think to pull him out, instead racing outside the house to call for help.

From across Martin Street, where their father owned a delicatessen, the Mangione boys came running. Already known locally as talented young jazz musicians, they still spent afternoons helping out at the family store.

They knew little about first aid, and it showed. Chuck's first few attempts to revive the baby did nothing. Desperate, Gap picked up the near-lifeless body and pushed hard, compressing the baby's tiny back and chest. Suddenly, little James was breathing on his own again.

Four days later, all hell broke loose on Joseph Avenue, just a few blocks away.

As a group of looters made their way down Martin Street and approached the delicatessen, a group of neighbors from the racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood stood waiting.

"Not this store," they said.

The looters moved on.

“The people in the neighborhood loved the Mangiones ... They were kind of like, part of us. They were our friends.”

William Turner, 65

Then and now

Speaking in his Greece home 50 years later, Gap Mangione isn't certain that the rescue played a role in why his family's store was spared.

"The thing I remember most is that we all cared about each other. That was an important aspect of why we were there," said Gap Mangione. "The neighbors and my father and us, we were very close. I think that was an important, if not as important, aspect of the store not being bothered."

William Turner, Larkin's uncle who witnessed the rescue, offered a similar explanation.

"The people in the neighborhood loved the Mangiones. We would have been very disappointed had someone broken into the Mangiones' store," said Turner, 65, of Rochester. "They were kind of like, part of us. They were our friends."

But while the store was viewed as a friendly place for all members of the community regardless of skin color, its reputation made it a clear outlier in what was a starkly divided Rochester.

1960: Population breakdown

In 1960, there were 318,611 people living in Rochester. Below is the racial breakdown.

White

Black

Other races

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U.S. Census data

D&C

*Other races = 642 or .2%

2010: Population breakdown

In 2010, there were 210,565 people living in Rochester. Below is the racial breakdown.

White

Black

Other races

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U.S. Census data

D&C

The vast majority of Monroe County residents (95.7 percent) were white, and 63 percent of white homes were owner-occupied, according to data from the 1960 census. At the same time, only 25 percent of black households were owner-occupied. Only 23 percent of blacks over the age of 25 had high school degrees, and blacks had a 14.2 percent unemployment rate, compared with 3.9 percent for the population as a whole.

Due in part to discriminatory housing practices of the era, blacks were also geographically condensed, with many families living in just a few city blocks.

The two communities were, literally and figuratively, black and white.

Today, Rochester is a different place. Whites now make up 76.7 percent of Monroe County residents. Blacks account for 15.1 percent, and people identifying as a different race — all other races combined made up just over 0.1 percent combined in 1960 — now make up the remaining 8.2 percent.

1960: Population breakdown

In 1960, there were 267,776 people living in the suburbs of Rochester. Below is the racial breakdown.

White

Black

Other races

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U.S. Census data

D&C

* Black = 598 or .2%; Other races = 241 or .01%

2010: Population breakdown

In 2010, there were 533,779 people living in the suburbs of Rochester. Below is the racial breakdown.

White

Black

Other races

Sponsored by

U.S. Census data

D&C

In the wake of a large influx of Puerto Rican residents over the last several decades, Hispanics — who can fall into any racial category — now account for 7.2 percent of the county's population. And enclaves of other ethnic groups, including a group of Bhutanese refugees in northwest Rochester, a large complement of Somali families scattered throughout the city, and a collection of Mexican farmworkers in Wayne County, also inhabit the metropolitan area.

Economically, the city of Rochester recently cracked the top 5 list in the nation in terms of percentage of city residents who are impoverished, and poverty is still heavily concentrated in certain areas of the city. But in terms of raw numbers, there are actually more poor people in the greater metropolitan area who live outside city lines than inside.

Skin color and ethnicity are still strongly correlated with wealth. But due in part to the more diverse makeup of the region, and a spread of poverty to the suburban and rural areas in and around Monroe County, the debate isn't so black and white any more. Politically, the civil rights movement has been replaced by a new narrative.

"I don't see it as black-versus-white," said Lovely Warren, the first black woman to serve as mayor of Rochester. "I think that it's more rich-versus-poor, have-versus-have-nots. That includes poor immigrants that have come to this country or live in this area, poor blacks, poor whites, poor Hispanics. When you look at the issues around education, around unemployment, it hits those people that have the least chance of breaking the cycle of poverty, more than it does any race."

“I don't see it as black-versus-white. I think that it's more rich-versus-poor, have-versus-have-nots.”

Mayor Lovely Warren

Things change

Raymond Scott remembers when, one year after the riots, a City Council election was stolen from Constance Mitchell. In the legislative chambers that night, Scott recalls Mitchell's vote total reaching 1,291, a lead of 49 votes over her competitor, who had 1,242.

"This was when they did everything by hand, and the guy wrote 'Final' across it," said Scott, who served as the leader of the local civil rights group FIGHT — Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, and Today — from 1971 to 1975. "That same guy went downstairs, came back up, and pulled down what he'd written for Constance Mitchell, pulled down the 'Final' sign, and wrote 1,242. I knew right away what they were going to do — they were going to go after the absentee ballots."

Mitchell ultimately lost the runoff by two votes, and would say in a 2008 interview that it was only after a handful of her supporters' absentee ballots were destroyed by party officials.

Five decades later, Scott likes to think that an election theft that brazen couldn't happen today.

"Does that signal a change? Well, obviously some, because (Lovely Warren) couldn't have won with all black votes. We have a black president now," said Scott. "At the time, in the heyday of the FIGHT organization, you maybe had one black on the school board, and didn't have any blacks on the City Council. Now, you have four blacks on City Council. That was unheard of before. So have things changed in these 50 years? They have. Do we still have some ways to go? Yeah."

“Have things changed in these 50 years? They have. Do we still have some ways to go? Yeah.”

Raymond Scott, former leader of FIGHT, a local civil rights group

Hiring more blacks

Following the riots, the FIGHT organization, headed by the Rev. Franklin Florence, pushed local companies to start hiring more black employees. After a well-publicized falling out between FIGHT and Eastman Kodak, Florence met with Joseph Wilson, the head of Xerox Corp., and struck an accord.

Soon, other companies were falling in line.

"Kodak began to hire black people on their own, just to say they were doing it," said Scott. "FIGHT was demanding, at one point, 600 jobs. Kodak went out on its own and brought in 1,200 black folks."

But the advances haven't done a lot to close certain gaps, and Rochester still lags well behind the state and country in terms of minority poverty. While 22 percent of blacks and 25 percent of Hispanics live below the poverty line in New York state, 34 percent of blacks in the greater Rochester area are impoverished, as are 33 percent of Hispanics, according to census data recently highlighted by the Rochester Area Community Foundation.

Homeownership among blacks has climbed 11 percentage points over the past 50 years, as 36 percent of black households are owner-occupied. But white homeownership in Monroe County has also climbed over the past 50 years, from 63 percent to 73 percent. Meanwhile, blacks are still three times as likely to be unemployed as whites, while Hispanics are twice as likely.

And while blacks and Hispanics now have representatives within the government of the city of Rochester, minority representation in the wealthier communities of Rochester is completely nonexistent: Every town board member in every Monroe County town and every county legislator who represents a suburb is white.

'Segregated lives'

Though the racial and economic makeup of the greater Rochester area has diversified somewhat, there are still highly concentrated areas of poverty in the city.

“Rochester has made it possible for a majority of the population to remain blissfully unaware of the challenges of the other part of the population.”

Jennifer Leonard, president and CEO of the Community Foundation

But while boarded-up houses and open-air drug markets are ubiquitous in certain city neighborhoods, the fact that poverty has clustered so densely in these areas actually makes it easier to avoid altogether. When the Rochester Area Community Foundation in December highlighted the city as being the fifth poorest in the country, many who shared the study on social media expressed bewilderment that things had gotten so bad.

"We live such segregated lives — rich and poor, educated and not educated, people of color and whites — Rochester has made it possible for a majority of the population to remain blissfully unaware of the challenges of the other part of the population," said Jennifer Leonard, president and CEO of the Community Foundation. "Similarly, the people living in poverty don't necessarily see themselves as different. They look around and their neighborhoods reflect the same situation they're in. So you're talking about two distinct cultures from an economic point of view."

But the perception divide hasn't actually translated to a lack of participation — quite the opposite, actually. Rochester is No. 2 in the country in volunteer rate, a ranking which has been climbing in recent years. The regional United Way office regularly raises almost as much money as the United Way chapters of Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany combined.

Such statistics would seem to suggest that the city's minorities should be seeing more opportunities than those in other areas of the state, not fewer.

"What that suggests to me is that the underlying policies and structures that promote inequality are more ingrained here than other places," said James Norman, president and CEO of Action for a Better Community, an agency formed to fight poverty in the wake of the riots. "It says to me that in other communities for whatever reasons — available jobs or the outcomes of the educational systems — the environment for advancing seems to be better in those other places than here."

Some of those structural inequities are obvious. Rochester's transformation from a manufacturing community into one centered around higher education and health care has left fewer jobs for those with less education. Meanwhile, affordable housing remains scarce in the Monroe County suburbs, limiting the ability of poorer residents to seek better school options for their children.

But finding a palatable solution to these imbalances is far more difficult. Zoning rules in some towns make the construction of affordable housing challenging or impossible, and even when roadblocks are cleared, there is often pushback from community members.

Meanwhile, nearly 50 years after its inception, only seven of the 18 suburban school districts in Monroe County participate in the Urban Suburban program, and William A. Johnson, former Rochester mayor, was trounced in his 2003 run for county executive after advocating a metropolitan school system that would allow city children to attend school in the suburbs.

Such responses can add an extra layer of challenge for organizations like the Rochester Area Community Foundation, which has been spreading information about the region's poverty and racial inequities while attempting to remain bipartisan in its mission.

"When you're working on something that really matters, and it disrupts people's sense of the way things are, it's unlikely that 100 percent of the people will ever agree," said Leonard. "But you have to keep going anyway when it's the right thing to do."

"It's definitely risky, and very bold," said Norman. "I have the highest respect for Jennifer and her board for doing what they didn't have to do."

The risk

But crossing community boundaries always involves taking a risk. Five decades ago, Joseph Wilson took one when he met with Franklin Florence. The Mangione family did, too, not just in their rescue of young James Larkin, but in their decision to operate such a colorblind store when so many businesses were doing otherwise.

And it doesn't always reap returns.

The memories that Carol Dorsey has of her father's store, Danishefsky's, read similarly to a description of the Mangione delicatessen. Her father was a well-liked merchant, and his grocery store, at the corner of Joseph and Herman, was a community hub. When shoppers, regardless of race, were a few dollars short, he'd give them their groceries anyway and use little pieces of white tape to affix their name and tab to the wall.

An elderly black woman who lived above the store was a close family friend. When the riots began, she leaned out the window, urging looters not to touch the store. This was her building, she called down. This store is black-owned — not to be touched.

When family members returned to survey the damage, all their merchandise was gone; the fixtures and furniture, destroyed. The only things that remained were the credit slips, affixed to the wall with little spots of white tape.

It was years before her family recovered from the loss. They never came back to Joseph Avenue, as Dorsey's father focused his remaining energy on a store he'd opened on Monroe Avenue.

"My dad was a very quiet, introspective person and he didn't say a lot, but I could see that it broke his heart," she said.

But the courage shown by the neighbor is what Dorsey carries with her. It's that story — not the loss of her family's livelihood — that Dorsey chooses to remember five decades later.

"She was not able to save it, but I think it meant a lot to him," she said. "That was very brave, in the midst of all that turmoil, to stand up and say 'This is mine.' "

Census data from 1960 and 2010 reveal how much Monroe County has changed. In 1960, the county's population was almost evenly distributed between the city and the suburbs, but blacks were congregated in the city. In all, 97.5 percent of blacks lived in the city — and the census counted only 839 non-white individuals living in the suburbs. Today, there are nearly 60,000, or roughly one-third of the total minority population, outside of the city.

In 2014, 50 years after racially charged riots scarred the city, the series begins anew. Throughout the year, Unite Rochester will focus on our community's diversity and divisions through the lens of our past.